The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor, ex-cowboy, and musician Sam Shepard now stands revealed as a storyteller of dazzling artistry. The short stories, journal entries, and dialogues collected in Cruising Paradise take us from a South Dakota motel room, where a man and a woman fight bitterly and part mysteriously, to a Mexican border town, where a mortified actor charms a female bureaucrat by pretending to be Spencer Tracy. Bleak and wildly funny, touching but stringently unsentimental, Sam Shepard's tales map the places where our culture is defined, while giving us our most intimate vision yet of a writer who has become synonymous with the recklessness, stoicism, and solitude of American manhood.